Last updated: Monday April 21, 2008, EDT 5:15 AM
Chick Corea has played with Miles Davis. He's played the role of jazz fusion pioneer with his band, Return to Forever — which has reunited for a tour that kicks off at the end of May. He's played with a full orchestra, and he's played alone to great critical acclaim. He's juggled the hats of bandleader, composer and pianist like a seamless trick, rarely taking a moment to breathe in the course of a career that's pushing 50 years.
But right now, the Grammy-winning jazz artist is on tour doing something he's never done before: playing in a trio with Bobby McFerrin and drummer Jack DeJohnette.
"I don't even know what's going to happen," Corea said with a laugh two weeks ago, before leaving on the tour. "We're going to get together for our first gig. ... I know some music is going to happen, but I don't know what."
The trio will be at bergenPAC Tuesday and at Carnegie Hall Wednesday, so North Jerseyans have two chances to see them sink or swim.
Luckily, Corea has played with McFerrin and DeJohnette in separate musical configurations. DeJohnette was a fellow band mate from his time with Miles Davis in the late 1960s, and Corea has been working with McFerrin since their 1991 duet CD, "Play."
"The performance will be, for the most part, improvised, which is the way Bobby and I have done our duet work," Corea said. "We don't really discuss what we're going to do, ever, and we work it all out onstage as we go."
This wouldn't be the first time McFerrin has persuaded him to walk into the unknown. A jack-of-all-trades himself, McFerrin cajoled Corea for years to get him to play Mozart piano concertos with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, which he conducted.
"He kept inviting me to play with his orchestra, and I kept saying no because it would just be too much practice to get it to happen," said Corea of McFerrin. "But between his encouragement and my wife Gail's encouragement, I finally did it."
In 1996, they recorded the "Mozart Sessions," a compilation of concerto performances. And so it was that the two collaborators, who found each other through improvisation, deepened their relationship by doing the opposite: playing composed music.
"In Bobby's orchestral projects, when he's conducting, he's operating with a whole program of pre-written music — very fixed in the way the score goes," said Corea. (In addition to the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, McFerrin has worked with the Vienna Philharmonic, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic and the Gewandhaus Orchestra, among others.)
"But Bobby is an amazing improviser. So I think the contrast of doing performances that are completely improvised provides a balance. And it's the same for me."
Like other musicians who have straddled the divide between jazz and classical, Corea sees continuity between the genres. It took a shock, however, to open his eyes to the modern appeal of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
In the early 1980s, Corea was invited to be the jazz component of a piano festival in Munich, Germany — "It was all classical pianists," he remembered. There, he played with the late Austrian classical pianist Friedrich Gulda, who happened to have dipped his toe in jazz.
Corea noticed a strikingly beautiful passage that Gulda inserted during an improvised solo onstage. He knew immediately that it must have been written, but he had no idea who it could be.
"I said to him, 'Hey, what was that you just played? Was that some young guy?' " said Corea. "And he looked at me kind of strange and said, 'No, that was Mozart.' It caught me off guard, because I thought I didn't like Mozart."
He began studying Mozart's oeuvre, burying his ears in the harmonic structures and melodies. When McFerrin found out that his friend had caught the classical bug, the rest was history.
Ever the improviser, Corea ended up departing from script for the cadenzas, or the piano solo portions of the Mozart concertos. "That was the original intent, actually," he explained.
The experiment was not without its bumps. At first, Corea injected too much of his jazz background into the cadenzas. "I think I offended some people," he said ruefully.
"After that, I did take the time to delve into the score and the harmonic language and the Mozartian ways a bit more. So that my later cadenzas, like on the 'Mozart Sessions,' pay more attention to the Mozart style."
Now he's embarked on yet another experiment with McFerrin, and he has no doubt that the payoff will be equal to all their previous collaborations. After all, who could manage not to have fun working with the guy who brought us "Don't Worry, Be Happy"?
"Bobby's a very fun-loving guy, and both of us are a little wacky," said Corea. "We get on that way. ... That's the reason we named the first duet disc we recorded 'Play.' Because that's what we like to do when we're together.
"He's a great impersonator, you know," he added.
We can imagine.
E-mail: shih@northjersey.com
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